What’s a site map? A Beginners Guide to writing a plan for your website
A ‘site map’ is a broad term that generally refers to the structure of a website. Depending on who’s asking, a site map can take many forms – but the real question behind “show me your site map” is: “What does your site need to do?”
Sitemaps usually contain:
- A list of pages required
- Some sense of hierarchy (relationship between pages)
- The content of the pages
Sitemaps can go on to define how the navigation works on your website, as well as letting the designer know how the pages should appear based on the content they display. Don’t forget that any good web designer will start with the content for a site and then shape the design around it.
iPhones, iPads and Flash
We’re being asked more and more about iPhones, iPods and iPads and the compatibility of our photographers websites.
Until the introduction of the iPad, it really wasn’t too much of a problem as the amount of people visiting a photographers website to actually look at making a booking or purchasing prints using a mobile phone was negligible. Looking at Google Analytics of some of our photographers sites confirms this, with an average only about 1.5% to 2% of visitors using these devices to look at their sites, generally going direct to the contact page. Even on the Phosys website only around 3% of visitors use iPhones, iPods the iPad to browse our site.
The iPad has sparked a new “Tablet War”, and in the next few months we will see many more alternatives based on Google’s Android operating system that does run Flash. However, Flash is going to become a big issue for us because of the amount of people who will be using the iPad.
Because of this we’ve just started development of some new jQuery based applets that will run on any up-to-date browser, any device and any operating system. As we release these new applets, we will show examples of them here on our blog, tweet about them and put them in our demonstration site.
Template Based Sites
At the SWPP 2011 trade show in Hammersmith, we launched the first three of our template based sites – Aperture, Backscatter and Chroma. It is only a coincidence in the fact that they start with A, B and C – we are not going to go through the whole alphabet! (In fact the next one currently in development is called Bayer – as in the colour filter array!)
We decided to use photographic terms for the template names as it seemed most appropriate, and in the whole these are giving us inspiration for the designs themselves.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding more to the collection, looking back over the hundreds of bespoke sites that we’ve built over the years for professional photographers and building more templates that are appropriate for all different genres and tastes. (more…)
SWPP 2011 – Thank you!
Now we’ve returned from The Societies Convention 2011, we’d just like to say a quick thank you to everyone who visited our stand over the three days of the trade show.
We’re starting to work through the new customers requests, and are looking forward to designing and setting up some excellent new sites for them.
At the show we also launched our new packages – template based websites, WordPress blogging, custom sites and proofing only packages. So we now have several different options available for photographers. We’ll be talking about these on our blog over the coming days.
It was great to meet so many of you at the show, our new re-branded stand and literature went down really well, and a special thank you must go to two of our existing customers who actually joined in with the sales pitch as we were talking to prospective customers on separate occasions. (You know who you are – Paul & Nigel! )
Setting up at SWPP 2011
New stand, new products, new literature, new website and blog branding!
We’ve now got the stand set up and finished at the Novotel London West ready for The Societies Convention 2011. Hopefully all the “junk” around the floor will be removed by tomorrow morning! This year we’re next to GF Smith and Hot Press in the Champagne Suite on the main floor.
If you’re coming along to the convention, please come and visit us on stand 149.
Phosys Popup Stand 2011
